Second of all, please read my comment and the comment I was responding to. It says:
>> the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them.
and then the conclusion is:
>> In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees.
Which, again, is hippie logic. I don't know anyone who would be happy with a 25% cut in pay.
I was not responding to the article. I was responding to a comment with faulty logic.
Regarding your 2008 example. This is irrelevant. Of course people would take a cut in pay under such circumstances. Yet, again, this is irrelevant given the conversation. The proposal here is that utopia exists somewhere around working six hours. Then someone realized you can't do that and still produce the same number of widgets. Then someone said you don't need to pay people 8 hours if they work 6, yet, they should be happy. And, BTW, we can employ more people, because, well, you need 8 hours to do 8 hours of work.
The whole thing reeks of a government program designed to burn cash for who knows what reason. Spend millions researching something that can be demonstrated to be utter nonsense in 15 minutes in front of a white board.
Historically it was the experience of people who wanted the output of cottage workers, that the cottage workers would only work up to the point where they had earned their desired income level, rather than up to what the customer wished they would do. Gathering the cottage workers into factories enabled the boss/customer to insist on more hours of work (compensated at piece rate originally). People have shown themselves to be satisfied with doing less work for less money, even in the presence of demand that they could choose to earn more by meeting. This is perhaps a "cut in pay" from a total pay point of view. In terms of earned pay it is the same pay rate. During the Swedish demo it sounds like they were studying the effect of the reduced hours in isolation from the effect of a hypothetical pay cut. Clearly some workers ARE hippies and would be happy to work less than some of us do for less pay, a legitimate trade that autonomous, free individuals could agree to.
That's not my interpretation of the message you responded to. It too points out that the article mentions no pay cut and that a different source confirms there was no pay cut.
I think it's important to know that this experiment was done to quantify the positive benefits such as reduced number of sick days. In a country where sick days are paid by a public insurance, that's no small factor in this (a public employer that is).
Basically: if our government both provides for those who are employed but sick (often overworked) and for those who are unemployed, then perhaps more people should share public jobs?
The drawbacks and costs (how many you need to hire and what that would cost) was known.
In a full scale implementation of this, I doubt the deal would be 100% pay for 30h weeks, either it would be like in the Volvo scenario with e.g 90% pay 80% work, or a deal could include freezing wages for N years in exchange for slowly lowered hours over the same period.
Interesting, in Germany the people in the metal industry only work 35 hours a week, just 5 hours more, and they are one of the best payed groups. I guess it depends on how we can automate and how much we value this or that kind of work.
First of all, I am relaxed.
Second of all, please read my comment and the comment I was responding to. It says:
>> the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them.
and then the conclusion is:
>> In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees.
Which, again, is hippie logic. I don't know anyone who would be happy with a 25% cut in pay.
I was not responding to the article. I was responding to a comment with faulty logic.
Regarding your 2008 example. This is irrelevant. Of course people would take a cut in pay under such circumstances. Yet, again, this is irrelevant given the conversation. The proposal here is that utopia exists somewhere around working six hours. Then someone realized you can't do that and still produce the same number of widgets. Then someone said you don't need to pay people 8 hours if they work 6, yet, they should be happy. And, BTW, we can employ more people, because, well, you need 8 hours to do 8 hours of work.
The whole thing reeks of a government program designed to burn cash for who knows what reason. Spend millions researching something that can be demonstrated to be utter nonsense in 15 minutes in front of a white board.